By its focus on the African immigrant family, Engaging the Diaspora: Migration and African Families carves its own niche on the migration discourse. It brings together the experiences of African immigrant families as defined by various transnational forces. As an interdisciplinary text, Engaging makes a handy reference for scholars and researchers in institutions of higher learning, as well as for community service providers working on diversity issues. It promotes knowledge about Africans in the Diaspora and the African continent through current and relevant case studies. This book enhances learning on the contemporary factors that continue to shape African migrants."

In 1966, a soft-spoken 32-year old man emerged from relative obscurity and humble background to become Nigeria's Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. His name was Lt Col (later General)Yakubu Gowon. He emerged as the compromise candidate following the political crisis that engulfed the country after the July 1966 military coup that had led to the assassination of the country's first military Head of State, General Aguiyi Ironsi. At the end of the Civil War in 1970, General Gowon's doctrine of 'No Victor No Vanquished' greatly endeared him to many, and he was variously dubbed 'Abraham Lincoln of Nigeria', 'a soft spoken but dynamic leader' 'a real gentleman' and 'an almost faultless administrator'. However, after he was overthrown in a military coup in July 1975, long knives were drawn out for him, with the hitherto friendly press and public crying 'crucify him', and now variously vilifying him as 'weak' and of managing a purposeless administration that had led to the 'drifting' of the nation. In this book Professor J. Isawa Elaigwu attempts a scholarly political biography of someone he believes has rendered great services to the Nigerian nation despite his weaknesses as a leader. He rejects the notion that Gowon's nine years in office were 'nine years of failure' as the General's ardent critics posit, arguing that if it is possible to identify a number of thresholds in his administration, it is also possible to identify the approximate point in time when the strains of his administration became visible to observers and the public in general. He poses and methodically seeks answers to a number of fundamental questions: Who was Yakubu Gowon? Why and how was the reservoir of goodwill and credibility which he had accumulated by the end of the Civil War expended? What image of Nigeria did he have when he came into power? And did he ever achieve his objectives? The book, first published in 1986, has been revised and expanded for this edition ____________________________________ Dr. J. Isawa Elaigwu is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Jos, Jos, Nigeria. He is currently the President of the Institute of Governance and Social Research (IGSR), Jos, Nigeria. A widely travelled academic, Professor Elaigwu's works have been widely published within and outside Nigeria. He has also served as a consultant to many national and international agencies.

At the age of 17, Samuel L. Broadnax--enamored with flying--enlisted and trained as a pilot at the Tuskegee Army Air Base. Although he left the Air Corps at the end of the Second World War, his experiences inspired him to talk with other pilots and black pioneers of aviation. Blue Skies, Black Wings recounts the history of African Americans in the skies from the very beginnings of manned flight. From Charles Wesley Peters, who flew his own plane in 1911, and Eugene Bullard, a black American ace with the French in World War I, to the 1945 Freeman Field mutiny against segregationist policies in the Air Corps, Broadnax paints a vivid picture of the people who fought oppression to make the skies their own.

Using slave trials from antebellum Virginia, Christopher H. Bouton offers the first in-depth examination of physical confrontations between slaves and whites. These extraordinary acts of violence brought the ordinary concerns of enslaved Virginians into focus. Enslaved men violently asserted their masculinity, sought to protect themselves and their loved ones from punishment, and carved out their own place within southern honor culture. Enslaved women resisted sexual exploitation and their mistresses. By attacking southern efforts to control their sexuality and labor, bondswomen sought better lives for themselves and undermined white supremacy. Physical confrontations revealed the anxieties that lay at the heart of white antebellum Virginians and threatened the very foundations of the slave regime itself. While physical confrontations could not overthrow the institution of slavery, they helped the enslaved set limits on their owners' exploitation. They also afforded the enslaved the space necessary to create lives as free from their owners' influence as possible. When masters and mistresses continually intruded into the lives of their slaves, they risked provoking a violent backlash. Setting Slavery's Limits explores how slaves of all ages and backgrounds resisted their oppressors and risked everything to fight back.

is a collection of three life stories by three Korean high school students in New York and New Jersey. Hojae Jin is a senior at Tenafly High School in New Jersey. Kevin Kang is a senior at a high school in Rockland County, New York. David Yun is a senior at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. This book is crucial for understanding the experiences of Korean-American youth. By reading this book, readers will share in joys and sorrows of the Korean immigration experience.

This book is an essential addition to the study of comparative black literature of the Americas; it will also fill the gap that exists on theoretical studies exploring black women's writing from the Spanish Caribbean. This book examines literary representations of the historic roots of black women's resistance in the United States and Cuba by studying the following texts by both African American and Afro-Cuban women from four different literary genres (autobiographical slave narrative, contemporary novel on slavery, testimonial narrative, and poetry): Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by the African American former slave Harriet Jacobs, Dessa Rose (1986) by the African American writer Sherley Ann Williams, Reyita, sencillamente: testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenarian Simply Reyita. Testimonial Narrative of a Nonagenarian Black Cuban Woman] (1996), written/transcribed by the Afro-Cuban historian Daisy Rubiera Castillo from her interviews with her mother Maria de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, "Reyita," and a selection of poems from the contemporary Afro-Cuban poets Nancy Morejon and Georgina Herrera. The study argues that the writers participate in black women's self-inscription in the historical process by positioning themselves as subjects of their history and seizing discursive control of their (hi)stories. Although the texts form part of separate discourses, the book explores the commonalities of the rhetorical devices and narrative strategies employed by the authors as they disassemble racist and sexist stereotypes, (re)constructing black female subjectivity through an image of active resistance against oppression, one that authorizes unconventional definitions of womanhood and motherhood. The book shows that in the womens' revisions of national history, their writings also demonstrate the pervasive role of racial and gender categories in the creation of a discourse of national identity, while promoting a historiography constructed within flexible borders that need to be negotiated constantly. The study's engagement in crosscultural exploration constitutes a step further in opening connections with a comparative literary study that is theoretically engaging, in order to include Afro-Cuban women writers and Afro-Caribbean scholars into scholarly discussions in which African American women have already managed to participate with a series of critical texts. The book explores connections between methods and perspectives derived from Western theories and from Caribbean and Black studies, while recognizing the black women authors studied as critics and scholars. In this sense, the book includes some of the writers' own commentaries about their work, taken from interviews (many of them conducted by the author Paula Sanmartin herself), as well as critical essays and letters. Black Women as Custodians of History adds a new dimension to the body of existing criticism by challenging the ways assumptions have shaped how literature is read by black women writers. Paula Sanmartin's study is a vivid demonstration of the strengths of embarking on multidisciplinary study. This book will be useful to several disciplines and areas of study, such as African diaspora studies, African American studies, (Afro) Latin American and (Afro) Caribbean studies, women's studies, genre studies, and slavery studies.

No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as "negro slavery." The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today's supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.

Miami, 1963. A young boy from Louisville, Kentucky, is on the path to becoming the greatest sportsman of all time. Cassius Clay is training in the 5th Street Gym for his heavyweight title clash against the formidable Sonny Liston. He is beginning to embrace the ideas and attitudes of Black Power, and firebrand preacher Malcolm X will soon become his spiritual adviser. Thus Cassius Clay will become 'Cassius X' as he awaits his induction into the Nation of Islam. Cassius also befriends the legendary soul singer Sam Cooke, falls in love with soul singer Dee Dee Sharp and becomes a remarkable witness to the first days of soul music. As with his award-winning soul trilogy, Stuart Cosgrove's intensive research and sweeping storytelling shines a new light on how black music lit up the sixties against a backdrop of social and political turmoil - and how Cassius Clay made his remarkable transformation into Muhammad Ali.

Becoming a Model Minority: Schooling Experiences of Ethnic Koreans in China looks at the manner in which ethnic Korean students construct self-perception out of the model minority stereotype in their school and lives in Northeast China. It also examines how this self-perception impacts the strength of the model minority stereotype in their attitudes toward school and strategies for success. Fang Gao shows how this stereotype tends to obscure significant barriers to scholastic success suffered by Korean students, as well as how it silences the disadvantages faced by Korean schooling in China's reform period and neglects the importance of multiculturalism and racial equality under the context of a harmonious society.

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"Draws upon previously neglected primary sources to offer a ground-breaking analysis of the intertwined political, racial, and religious dynamics at work in the institutional merging of three American Methodist denominations in 1939. Davis boldly examines the conflicted ethics behind a dominant American religious culture's justification and preservation of racial segregation in the reformulation of its post-slavery institutional presence in American society. His work provides a much-needed, critical discussion of the racial issues that pervaded American religion and culture in the early twentieth century.a
--Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, Academic Dean and Associate Professor of History and Theology, United Theological Seminary, Dayton Ohio

aA discerning, sober, and troubling probing of the preoccupation within the Methodist Church with Christian nationalism, civilization as defined by white Anglo-Saxon manhood, and race, race consciousness and athe problem of the Negroa that was foundational to and constitutive of a reunited Methodism. A must read for students of early 20th century America.a
--Russell E. Richey, Emory University

In the early part of the twentieth century, Methodists were seen by many Americans as the most powerful Christian group in the country. Ulysses S. Grant is rumored to have said that during his presidency there were three major political parties in the U.S., if you counted the Methodists.

The Methodist Unification focuses on the efforts among the Southern and Northern Methodist churches to create a unified national Methodist church, and how their plan for unification came to institutionalizeracism and segregation in unprecedented ways. How did these Methodists conceive of what they had just formed as auniteda when members in the church body were racially divided?

Moving the history of racial segregation among Christians beyond a simplistic narrative of racism, Morris L. Davis shows that Methodists in the early twentieth century -- including high-profile African American clergy -- were very much against racial equality, believing that mixing the races would lead to interracial marriages and threaten the social order of American society.

The Methodist Unification illuminates the religious culture of Methodism, Methodists' self-identification as the primary carriers of "American Christian Civilization," and their influence on the crystallization of whiteness during the Jim Crow Era as a legal category and cultural symbol.

"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." - Mark Twain Within your hands is a glimpse into the life, mind, soul, and "truth" of cherished American icon, Mark Twain. This uncensored autobiography is not only a legacy he left behind, but also a gift to all.
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He grew up on the shores of the Mississippi River and took his pen name from the way Mississippi steamboat crews measured the river's depth (the cry "Mark twain " meant the river was at least 12 feet deep and safe to travel).
Twain wrote prolifically, publishing novels, travelogues, newspaper articles, short stories, and political pamphlets. His best-known works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
On the surface, these novels are gripping adventure stories of boys running free on the Mississippi. However, on a deeper level, these novels are also serious works of social criticism. Written while America was still recovering from the Civil War and adjusting to the abolition of slavery, Twain's two best-known Mississippi River adventure tales also measure the depth of America's new economic and social realities.
His most personal and insightful writing came when he created his, "Final (and Right) Plan"-a free-flowing biography of the thoughts and interests he had toward the end of his life as he spoke his "whole frank mind." Along with the plan, came the instruction that the enclosed autobiography writings not be published in book form until 100 years after his death.
Today, we honor the life and writings of Mark Twain by publishing his personal opus-to reacquaint ourselves with the wit, wisdom, and ideals of this legendary American icon.

English has long emerged as the lingua franca of globalization but has been somehow estranged in the hands or mouths of aliens, from Joseph Conrad to Chang-rae Lee. Haltingly, their alien characters come to speak in the Anglo-American tongue, yet what emerges is skewed by accents, syntax, body language, and nonstandard contextual references-an uncanny, off-kilter language best described as Alienglish.Either an alien's English that estranges or an alienating English because it sounds so natural, it issues forth from an involuntarily forked tongue and split psyche, operating on two registers, one clear and comprehensible, the other occluded and unfamiliar. Alienglish hence diagnoses the literal split in language or the alien's English; it further suggests the metaphorical splits either of aliens in an English-speaking world or of the English language dubbing and animating an alien world. While such alien performances are largely ventriloquized by native writers in the name of aliens, most blatant of which are Western Orientalism and ethnic self-Orientalism, there were and still are exceptional nonnative writers in Anglo-American tongues, as a direct consequence of Eastern diasporas to the nineteenth-century British Empire and then to the twentieth-century U.S. Empire. These writers include Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Jerzy Kosinski, Kazuo Ishiguro, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Ha Jin, who all seem to share a predicament: the strange English tongue they belabor to host in an effort to feel at home in the Anglo-American host culture as well as in their own bodies deemed foreign bodies. Wherever one hails from, an alien with a tongue graft is doomed to be either a tragic outcast or a pathetic clown, caught between two irreconcilable languages and cultures, searching for an identity in English yet haunted by a phantom tongue pain. The book's methodology fuses the scholarly with the poetic, a montage that springs from the very nature of diaspora, which is as much about rational decisions of relocation as, put simply, feelings. The heart of diaspora, breaking like a cracked voice, is resealed by the head, making both stronger-until another thin line opens up. Only through this double helix of head and heart, thinking and feeling, can one hope to map the DNA of diaspora. Such an unorthodox melange balances the tongue as a cultural expression from the body and the tongue as a visceral reaction of the body. Any potential crack amid the superstructure of global English and its underside of alien tongues promises discovery of a new world, which has always been there. Alienglish hence arrays itself on a spectrum from the English's Alien to the Alien's English, from white representations of the Other to aliens' self-representations. The usual Orientalist suspects of Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and Gilbert and Sullivan swell to capture affectless aliens from sci-fi, Stieg Larsson, and Lian Hearn. The book then turns to images of Shanghai and Macau, Asian Canadian Joy Kogawa and Evelyn Lau, and the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. It concludes with an examination of the new China hands (Ha Jin, et al.) and the global media's search for the sublime. The title of this book Alienglish appropriately conveys the uniqueness of this book, which will be a useful contribution to Asian and Asian American studies, comparative literature, diaspora studies, film studies, popular culture, and world literature.

The variety and complexity of its traditions make African American religion one of the most difficult topics in religious studies to teach to undergraduates. The sheer scope of the material to be covered is daunting to instructors, many of whom are not experts in African American religious traditions, but are called upon to include material on African American religion in courses on American Religious History or the History of Christianity. Also, the unfamiliarity of the subject matter to the vast majority of students makes it difficult to achieve any depth in the brief time allotted in the survey courses where it is usually first encountered. The essays in this volume will supply functional, innovative ways to teach African American religious traditions in a variety of settings.